INFORMAL SOCIAL NETWORK AND TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER IN R&D

Abstract

There’s a growing interest in Knowledge Management (KM) in the corporate world. The company’s ability to compile the accrued knowledge, organize are valued by what they know. Knowing the organization, its culture and how your employees relate themselves formal or informally, became fundamental for elaborating strategies for an efficient KM application. The formal relationship is easily recognized in the organizational charts of any organization type; however the informal relationships, which generate high synergy, are not much explored as a manner of knowledge sharing. The present article has the purpose of presenting how the interpersonal relationship occurs in a general management of CENPES (Research Center Leopoldo Américo Miguez de Mello) which develops basic engineering projects for the oil and gas industry, identifying its key actors through the Social Network Analysis (SNA). We aimed to reveal how the employee sample is organized, considering four analysis factors: information, knowledge, friendship and trust. For data source, a survey was performed through questionnaires applied for the employees of the studied unit. For the analysis, UCINET and NETDRAW tools were used. As results, the key actors were identified for the four analysis factors and which is the relationship among the group. We have verified a bottleneck in information and knowledge transfer as well as little interaction among the groups of studied management teams.